For a long time now, I've had a habit that's saved me from countless headaches: instead of deleting a file or directory outright, I rename it by adding the prefix '2k' --— short for "to kill."
This simple trick has rescued me many times, especially when I messed something up and had no other backup.
Later, during cleanup, I just delete the oldest 2k-prefixed files.
Also, Emacs automatically creates backup files with names like #filename# when saving.
Nice tip as well:
Funny, I do this with my digital trash can: When I was consulting at Bell Labs in the early 1980s I saw that a friend of mine had two garbage cans in his office. When I asked him why, he explained that one was for genuine garbage and the other was a buffer into which he would throw documents that he thought he’d probably never want again. He’d let the buffer garbage can fill up, and once it was full, he’d throw away the lower documents in it, since from the fact that he hadn’t fished them out, he figured he’d probably never miss them if they were thrown away permanently. ... I do this but don't throw the documents away. Instead I put the "buffer" into longer term storage (read: jammed into a box in my shed that can at least be searched even if it takes ages). It turns out that, for me, there are quite a lot of things you suddenly need a year or more later that felt unimportant at the time.. insurance documents, warranties, car related documents that are useful when selling the car, documents relating to house improvements. These should probably be filed better on day one, but this is life :-D
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Some time ago (before 24-Mar-2025) there was Disqus JS script for comments. I dropped it --- it was so motley, distracting, animated, with too much ads. I never liked it. Also, comments didn't appeared correctly (Disqus was buggy). Also, my blog is too chamberlike --- not many people write comments here. So I decided to switch to the model I once had at least in 2020 --- send me your comments by email to blog at yurichev dot com (don't forget to include URL to this blog post) and I'll copy&paste it here manually.
Let's party like it's ~1993-1996, in this ultimate, radical and uncompromisingly primitive pre-web1.0-style blog and website.